[In the following essay, Sanders explores the theme of knowledge and communication between parents and children in Neil Gaiman's Mr. Punch and his Sandman series, asserting that Gaiman uses these texts to illustrate the affect of misinformation on the minds of children.]

“I wouldn't want to gloss over the true facts”, says the narrator of Neil Gaiman's first graphic novel, Violent Cases (1987), lounging comfortably and looking for all the world like a portrait of Gaiman himself. “Without true facts”, he continues, “where are we?” Since Violent Cases goes on to demonstrate how few unquestionably true facts there are and how awkwardly they fit together, the answer to that apparently rhetorical question seems to be that we are, without objective certainties to depend on, in a world we build out of our fantasies, a land of dreams. The real question is where, if anywhere, we can go from there.

Violent Cases shows a small boy's fascination with the mysterious, dangerous world around him. Especially as the narrator presents it, the boy lived in a world full of intimations of violence and wonder. For example, the conjurer entertaining at a child's birthday party appears to be somehow allied with the gangsters who spirit away, as the boy watches delightedly, an old man who may have been Al Capone's osteopath. Just so, the angry game of musical chairs played by children at the party may echo Capone's vicious notion of competition as he walks around a circle of chairs and bashes in the heads of his “guests”. Other dangers and mysteries are closer to home. Before the story begins, the boy's own father settled a disagreement by jerking him along so sharply that he dislocated or at least severely sprained his son's shoulder. “Back then”, the narrator says of his father, “he seemed huge. He was my rock and my refuge. But when I read stories of giants fefifofumming their way through rocky castles, the ground echoing to their steps, sniffing for the blood of an Englishman in the way that only giants could—the giants always looked like my father.” Obviously, adult readers may say, the boy is exaggerating: His father was neither God Almighty nor a menacing giant. For the boy, however, those fantastic images are not merely the playful products of an innocent imagination but rather boundary markers within which a weak, uncertain entity can survive. But what did the boy have to do in order to survive? The narrator, looking back as a reflective yet somehow anxious adult, speculates on what was true or important in the child's experience. Since he cannot be sure himself, those questions are left for us readers to decide, based on our own sense of human possibility.

Gaiman and his collaborator, artist Dave McKean, intended to continue their exploration of memory and consciousness immediately (Thompson, p. 71). Instead, it was a few years before they returned to this quasi-autobiographical territory with The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch, hereafter referred to simply as Mr. Punch (1994). This book also is narrated by a man, unseen this time, with his youthful efforts to put together bits of information and observation so that he can understand the world in which he must live. Again, the task is extremely difficult, and again the adults surrounding the child are of little or no help. They actually try to deny useful understanding. Consider these true facts:

• An eight-year-old boy is staying with grandparents during the last weeks of his mother's pregnancy. His paternal grandfather owns a small, unsuccessful arcade in Portsmouth, one of whose attractions is a mermaid who poses semi-nude “in the middle of a very small artificial lake”. (Even while being scrupulously accurate in describing where she performs, the boy never refers to her as a young woman wearing a mermaid costume; to him, she is simply “the mermaid”.)
• The boy's grandfather and grandmother sleep in separate bedrooms, and the boy discovers that the man is away, possibly for at least one whole night.
• The teenaged assistant at the Punch and Judy show that sets up briefly in the arcade comments “knowingly” that the mermaid soon will have to quit her job because the costume won't fit.
• The boy sees his uncle, who may be allied financially somehow with his grandfather, talking with the mermaid. The man is describing how difficult it was to keep quiet what happened to “the last one”. The mermaid replies defensively, “Well, I'm not the last one, am I? And he loves me. He said so.” Before they catch sight of the boy and interrupt their argument, the man tells her, “He's an old man. He doesn't love anybody.”
• Professor Swatchell, proprietor of the Punch and Judy show, says that as a young man the boy's grandfather was “a bit of a lad for the ladies … That doesn't lead to a quiet life. And he never understood that it was a sin to sell fakes as the real thing.”
• The boy watches his uncle fill an envelope with money and deliver it to a woman.
• Although his grandfather has left him in his car outside the arcade one night, the boy enters the building. He sees “three men I recognized and a woman that I didn't” shouting at each other. When the woman laughs scornfully at one of the men, he picks up a stick and begins beating her in the face and stomach. As she runs out past the boy, “clutching her swollen stomach”, he recognises her.

It is relatively easy for readers to connect these hints and glimpses into a coherent narrative of sexual exploitation and betrayal. For the boy, it seems to be much more difficult. He walks down to where he saw the men but finds only his grandfather, “crying, in deep gasping sobs. That upset me more than anything else could have done. Adult helplessness destroys children, or it forces them to become tiny adults in their turn.” The boy does not reveal what sense he has made of what he witnessed but simply shows himself trying to comfort his grandfather and assist him back to the car. Once there, behind the steering wheel, the old man has an opportunity to explain to the boy what happened and to suggest how to cope with the understanding. Instead, now that he has pulled himself together again, he closes the subject altogether: “‘You didn't see anything,’ he said. He was telling me, not asking me.” When the authority figures in your life refuse to help you interpret experience and in fact demand that you deny your senses, what can you do? For good or ill, the boy has available a set of images by which to understand people beating and breaking each other: Punch and Judy. As Gaiman describes the puppet show, during an interview,

Mr. Punch is a murderous little glove puppet, beloved by children. His catch phrase, uttered almost unintelligibly, is … “That's the way to do it,” as he beats to death his wife and the policeman who comes to arrest him. At the end of it, he's killed everyone: he's killed the Devil and the guy who meant to hang him, and he's killed his wife and scared away her ghost … [sic] and now he's going off to bring happiness and joy to children everywhere.

(Thompson, p. 71)

It's fairly clear that the purpose of Punch and Judy shows is not just pleasure but instruction: “That's the way to do it.” Mr. Punch teaches children that big people, especially fathers, can get away with anything. What isn't clear is whether the puppet shows' primary audience is children or grownups. It may be adults who need constant reassurance about their roles. Children, on the other hand, have been brought to most of the performances described in Mr. Punch, and the children sometimes appear frightened or actively hostile. Violence is terrifying to the weak, who realise that they can't defend themselves against it, and Mr. Punch neatly symbolises such absolute violence. Early in the book, the boy mentions that his grandfather eventually went mad, after he wrecked his car, “all his affairs, business and otherwise” were over, and he stayed home, shouting angrily at his wife. On the page describing this, the grandfather is shown with his arms thrust out like a hand puppet's, his face hidden by a huge mask that combines his anguished, frightening features with Mr. Punch's.

On the other hand, the first thing shown in Mr. Punch is an earlier episode of the boy's life. As a seven-year-old, visiting his other grandfather, he goes fishing with the man, but he gets tired of that and walks alone back up the beach to a forlorn, empty little tent, where suddenly and without explanation a private performance of “the tragical comedy” begins for him. The boy watches as Judy leaves their baby with Punch who, when it begins to cry, “threw it out of the window. Not really. He didn't throw it out of the window. He threw it off the stage. It tumbled down from the stage onto the beach—and lay there, silent and bleeding.” After Mr. Punch's murder of his baby, the boy immediately runs away from the deserted tent, apparently horrified by what he has seen. There is no indication, however, that he even mentions the experience to anyone else then—or ever, until it becomes part of this book and until he has become as uncertain about what actually happened as he is concerned about what it could mean. Though presented as if immediately seen, verified by “pictures,” the boy's/narrator's observations are a mixture of the factual and the fantastic; for example, he corrects himself that the baby was not thrown through a non-existent window but off the stage, but then describes the puppet lying there “silent and bleeding”. But underlying readers' uncertainty about the true facts of events is the question of how perceptions become distorted in the first place and why observers fantasise so persistently. In other words, where did that particular Punch and Judy scene originate, based on the conviction that when one is being bothered by other people, casting them aside is the best solution, “the way to do it”?

From what the beginning of Mr. Punch demonstrates, children have already absorbed that attitude by the time they arrive at the puppet show. The boy apparently is shipped off to stay with his grandparents rather frequently. The reason never is clearly explained, for it may not be clear to the boy, but it appears to have something to do with his mother's disturbing habit of getting pregnant, an awkward process that disrupts living arrangements and family relationships. The boy seems to take little pleasure in the visits, but simply accepts them as part of the way things are. Docile acceptance is the safest way to behave around adults. When the boy's paternal grandfather notices that the boy is watching him as he waves to the mermaid in her lake, he picks him up and asks playfully, “‘Shall I throw you in, eh? Shall I throw you in the water?’” The boy mutely shakes his head, and the narrator comments that

Adults are threatening creatures.
Shall I throw you in the water?
I'll put you in the rubbish bin.
I'll eat you up.
I'll take you back and get another little boy.

That's what they say. And no matter how much you tell yourself that they're lying, or teasing, there's always a chance maybe they are telling the truth. …

Adults lie, but not always.

This comment, remember, is the adult narrator verbalising the child's silent understanding. Powerless, threatened, lied to, a child might naturally feel distrust or even hostility toward the big people around him, even though he would have acquired enough cunning to conceal his true feelings. Readers note, later in the book, how the boy's shadow becomes Punch's. And still later, as he watches the argument between the adults in the arcade, his skin changes texture so that his face looks like carved wood as he sees the baby puppet, lying on the edge of the Punch and Judy stage behind which he is concealed, and knocks it to the ground while his grandfather is beating his pregnant mistress.

The boy and his grandfather are more alike than they appear, far more than either of them ever could acknowledge. Even as a child, the boy sometimes is forced to act like a “tiny adult”, and in any case he is acquiring the skills required to behave like an adult. One such skill is concealment. Adults do not reveal any more of themselves than they must; instead, they create a frozen-faced surface to hide their real concerns. Children realise this and suppose that they must imitate it. When the boy asks his paternal grandfather about his past dealings with Professor Swatchell, he is told that “I should mind my own business; that if I asked no questions I would be told no lies. I wanted to ask whether, if I asked many questions, I would be told many lies, but I held my tongue. Adults do what adults do; they live in a bigger world to which children are denied access.” In order to enter that bigger world, where they imagine adults somehow gained the secret of their understanding and power, children try to become like them. To be a “tiny adult”, it seems to the boy, is to be stoic and unquestioning of others—or of himself also.

The advantage of taking on such a role is that one can avoid looking powerless and alone. The disadvantage is that one can easily drift into believing that role. Such belief can prevent a person from being able to function in the real world, and so that the boy's grandfather goes insane when his arcade goes bankrupt, he casts off his young mistress, he wrecks his expensive car—in short, when he is unable to deny convincingly that he is powerless and alone. It appears to be a circular process: refusing to understand what is happening in our lives lets us continue to deny understanding so that, with constant rehearsal, our performance becomes both seamlessly polished and dreadfully brittle.

And so we find Mr. Punch's narrator—“lonely now and very far from home”, an adult looking back at the adults who surrounded him as a child and at himself as a child studying them. Growing older, one is supposed to know the world better and to be more able to take confident action. Instead, the narrator gropes through his memories, deconstructing certainties and trying to grasp true facts.

Even if facts could be verified somehow, though, what then? The separate facts would have to be fitted together into a whole picture so we could know where we are and what we should be doing. In Mr. Punch, the separate pictures remain separate. The media in different panels vary from altered or enhanced photographs to line drawings or painted scenes; transitions between panels are often close to what Scott McCloud calls the “non-sequitur”, without an immediately apparent relationship. As McCloud continues, however, the very act of seeing panels next to each other leads readers to “find meaning or resonance in even the most jarring of combinations. Such transitions may not ‘make sense’ in any traditional way, but still a relationship of some sort will inevitably develop” (p. 72). Readers do try to recognise the different versions of the boy himself, sometimes in slashed or torn photographs, sometimes in unemotional line drawing—and once, feeling the inner turmoil after he has watched his grandfather drive away the mermaid, as a fully-painted but featureless “tiny adult” in the same panel with bits of other aspects of himself as a child. Mr. Punch's narrator, however, actively resists making the connections that readers can. He knows how vital it is to do so. As he says,

In a perfect world, it occurs to me now, I would write this in blood, not ink. One cannot lie, if one writes in blood. There is too much responsibility; and the ghosts of those one has killed will rise up and twist the pen down true lines, change the written word to the unwritten …

Yet, at the same time, he is too involved in the events Mr. Punch hints at to let himself look at them directly.

And thus the narrator finds himself trying to reveal truth by using story-telling, the same device that also is used for concealment. “The path of memory is neither straight nor safe, and we travel down it at our own risk. It is easier to take short journeys into the past, remembering in miniature, constructing tiny puppet plays in our heads. That's the way to do it.” At first this sounds like an admission of defeat, a surrender to selfish fantasy. Since the narrator has been defeated before he even begins trying to discover or connect true facts, however, it is possible that examining fantasies actually could be a way to grasp the truth. At least we already have been attempting to do so, in our earlier analysis of the book's opening scene in which the boy describes the impossible Punch and Judy performance he “saw”. We humans reveal ourselves as we put on the puppets of our choice, just as the boy imagines himself donning the costume head of a badger after a performance of Toad of Toad Hall, so that he could “become the badger, a tiny stumbling thing with a huge head, uttering vast truths I dared not think as a child.” Later still, Professor Swatchell lets the boy try on the Crocodile hand puppet from his Punch and Judy show, and the boy is thrilled as it comes to life: “I didn't ever want to give it back. I wanted it to sit on my arm forever, brave where I was fearful, impetuous where I held back. I would have taken it to school and scared my teachers, taken it home and made it eat my sister … [sic]” In both cases, playing a part allows the actor to reveal desires otherwise unacknowledged. When the boy requests a chance to try on Mr. Punch, however, Professor Swatchell refuses because “Once you bring Mister Punch to life, there's no getting rid of him.”

Clearly, the boy knows what he wants, although he knows better than to express his wishes. But the only character in Mr. Punch who can admit to awareness of such desire is the man who operates the Punch and Judy show. Unable to deal with true facts directly, humans are forced to approach reality indirectly, through fantasy. To the objection that “Things never happened thus,” one may reply that “Things need not have happened to be true. Tales and dreams are the shadow-truths that will endure when mere facts are dust and ashes, and forgot” (“A Midsummer Night's Dream” in Dream Country). So says Morpheus, Dream, the title character of Gaiman's The Sandman, the story that ran through seventy-five monthly installments, beginning not long after Violent Cases and overlapped the writing of Mr. Punch. In fact, the form and substance of The Sandman show a great deal about the quest for understanding and purpose that fills Gaiman's other writing.

Rather than beginning with the apparent advantage of meeting a protagonist anxious to communicate with us, readers of The Sandman start off outside Dream. We must try to figure out what he understands and what his purpose may be. And even when we don't have enough evidence, we must guess.

Guessing is necessary frequently in The Sandman. Gaiman used the interruptions of periodical publication to demonstrate how seldom we see a complete story at one time—or how little even the stories we see as wholes can be understood outside their context. Readers of the monthly magazine sometimes found parts of multi-issue story arcs, sometimes “short stories” complete inside one issue; however, they soon realised that each issue contained only some aspect of Dream, not his essence. This is apparent first of all visually. Gaiman utilised the fact that a monthly comics magazine requires more than one artist and that therefore characters are bound to look different from issue to issue. Beginning a new installment, readers cannot be certain what Dream will look like. It stands to reason that an ancient African queen would see Dream as one of her peers, while a contemporary white teen would see him as shaggy-haired punk rocker. In the same way, the character would not look the same in Chaucer's England as in contemporary London. Even within the same series or a single issue, Gaiman requested different artists for different sections, or gave instructions in his script so that Dream looks Oriental to a Japanese storm god while an Egyptian cat goddess sees him as feline.

Beyond that, however, Gaiman reminds readers that there are more sides to Dream's nature than can be reconciled easily. According to an early issue of The Sandman, thousands of years ago when Dream's African lover Queen Nada refused to stay with him, Dream responded by condemning her soul to “eternal pain” in Hell (“Tales in the Sand” in Doll's House). Just a few magazine issues later, during the 1800s, Dream advises the quasi-immortal Hob Gadling to get out of the slave trade because it means “treating your fellow humans as less than animals” (“Men of Good Fortune”, in Doll's House). Each of these actions is a true fact, as far as readers can know, but it is hard to see how they can originate from the same person. Dream remains aloof, enigmatic.

Gradually, through several episodes, readers do piece together something of Dream's origin. He is one of the Endless, beings who represent basic conceptual categories. The other members of his family are Destiny, Death, Destruction, the twins Desire and Despair, and finally Delirium (formerly known as Delight). Although the Endless sometimes act as pure embodiments of their names, they also display more personal identities. What readers can guess about Dream himself, based on what he demonstrates and what he says about himself, is that he is in charge of creating or at least potentially monitoring all dreams. He produces both reassuring fancies and nightmares. The focus of his actions is somewhere between those of his cute, perky older sister Death, who removes humans from this level of consciousness permanently, and his androgynous younger sister/brother Desire, who operates so much inside the world of our present senses that Desire's private citadel is merely an immense replica of his/her own body. Dream is, in short, a being of great power who lives by frequently mysterious rules. He is bigger than readers can estimate, let alone comprehend, but he is too important to ignore, too active in human lives.

Dream sounds, in practical terms, like the adults in Gaiman's Violent Cases and Mr. Punch, especially the grownup family members. Most especially, Dream resembles the fathers. As with grownups generally and parents in particular, one can never be quite sure whether to expect kindness or pain whenever Dream appears. In the first issues of The Sandman, he initially is seen as a prisoner, a victim of foolish occultists who imagined they were capturing Death. This introduction makes Dream appear sympathetic, and when he escapes decades later he takes only what seems appropriate revenge on his captors. As he repairs his realm and reassumes his power, he is sometimes oblivious to mere human concerns. Still, he acts against forces that readers find even less sympathetic, and he is capable of unexpected gentleness, as when he rescues young Rose Walker from the serial killer Funland and then gives a dream of peace to that tormented man who murdered children because of his frustrated loneliness: “I'm sorry, he tells the children. I'm sorry I hurt you all. Do you forgive me. Of course we forgive you, they say. Now let us play some more in these gardens, which are paradise.” And yet Dream himself prepares, in the last installments of the “Doll's House” story arc, to kill Rose because she somehow, unknowingly embodies a “dream vortex” that he believes could break down the barriers between individual dreamers and thus destroy this universe. There seems to be no way to figure out such a character; as the boy in Mr. Punch says of adults generally, the Sandman simply does what he does.

That's not altogether true. But before readers can consider how a grownup's mind can be changed, we must try to guess what Dream has on his mind.

What Dream talks about, whenever he wants to explain or justify himself, is Duty. As he tells Rose Walker, he is “the Lord of this Realm [of dreams], and my wishes are paramount. But I am not omnipotent.” And so, though he tells Rose he is sorry about having to do it, he will kill her because it is his duty to protect his area of responsibility, the supernatural realm called the Dreaming. As far as Dream knows, all this is unquestionably true. However, fortunately for Rose, her dying grandmother, Unity Kindaid, appears in the Dreaming to say that she will take Rose's place because she should have contained the vortex if she had not been unconscious while Dream was imprisoned. To Dream's bewildered comment that he doesn't understand what is going on, Unity replies “Of course you don't. You're obviously not very bright. But I shouldn't let it bother you.” So Duty, as it turns out, is not the absolute Dream thinks—or at least he may be mistaken about how it is to be carried out.

The real question is whether, or under what circumstances, Dream himself could recognise this qualification. Readers should remember both the Sandman's solemn certainty and Unity's irreverent debunking, indicating Gaiman's own balanced view of the character. Taking himself and his duties with utter seriousness, however, Dream seems unable to see himself except in rigid terms. That certainly is true in his relationship with Nada, in which he is willing to let her sacrifice her people and her world to stay with him. In fact, he demands she make that sacrifice, unable to recognise that she feels a sense of responsibility stronger than her love.

Readers can observe the Sandman's inability to reconcile personal feelings and obligations, camouflaged or denied by resolute belief in a public role, in his behavior as a parent. Again, readers become aware of this aspect of the character out of chronological order, after the severed but living head of Orpheus refers to Dream as his estranged father in a short story set during the French Revolution (“Thermidor” in Fables & Reflections). A later special issue of The Sandman, set in Ancient Greece, describes Dream's displeasure at Orpheus' rejecting his advice to get over his grief for the dead Eurydice and stoically continue with life. When Dream refuses to help Orpheus retrieve her soul from the underworld, the boy angrily declares his independence and leaves. After he has failed to save his lover from Hell and still cannot subdue his grief—after, essentially, he has behaved unlike Dream did with Nada—Orpheus is torn apart by the Bacchae. Dream retrieves his son's head on the beach, calmly remarking that he has “come to say goodbye. It seemed the proper thing to do.” He has spoken with priests who agreed to watch over the head from now on. However, he reminds Orpheus that the boy denied their relationship. Therefore, the Sandman will not help his son die, and he will never see him again: “Your life is your own … Your death, likewise. Always and forever your own. Fare well” (“The Song of Orpheus” in Fables & Reflections). And Dream strides away without looking back.

From what readers have seen of Dream by the time “Song of Orpheus” was published, it is not surprising that his behaviour with others is cool and formal. Even with his own son, he appears interested but remote. When affronted by a plea for personal intervention, thus, Dream's idea of punishment is further withdrawal: You did this to yourself, he tells Orpheus, and now you have to live with it. He does not see that by leaving his son in hopelessly mutilated physical condition he has him back under absolute control. He does not admit that he is leaving someone he cares for in helpless imprisonment.

At least, he does not recognise it at the time.

While he is treating the people around him without compassion, Dream justifies himself by appealing to his role as one of the Endless, his need to execute impersonal duty. Actually, his behaviour seems to be based on rigid habit, such a desperate unwillingness to consider change that it denies the existence of alternatives. When Orpheus' uncle Olethros (Destruction) insists that his father does care for him and Orpheus replies that “He has a strange way of showing it,” the Endless comments “Aye. But that's his way. He's set in his ways.” Orpheus' mother, the muse Calliope, says as much: “He cannot share anything; any part of himself. I thought I could change him. But he does not change. He will not. Perhaps he can not.” Centuries later in time—though earlier in the series of comic book stories—Dream frees Calliope from captivity, and she marvels that he has changed; he tells her “I have learned much in recent times” (“Calliope” in Dream Country). He had insisted that he must not and could not change, but now he has. And later, even though he is one of the Endless, nevertheless he dies.

The death of the Sandman, at the end of the “The Kindly Ones” story arc, announced the impending end of the regular comic book and set readers debating the reasons Dream accepts the termination of his existence. One difficulty readers have with The Sandman is that encountering episodes out of chronological order forces us to put the sequence of events together, and it sometimes is difficult to catch hints of how concerns are related. That probably is why Peter David mistakenly guesses that Dream ultimately commits suicide in reaction to his helpless imprisonment shown in The Sandman's beginning episodes, a kind of psychic rape that traumatised Dream unbearably because of his obsession with control. It is true that when, during their last conversation, Dream tells Death he has made preparations for his passing, she replies, “Hmph. You've been making them for ages. You just didn't let yourself know that was what you were doing” (The Kindly Ones). Actually, however, one of the things Dream has been doing frequently since escaping from his imprisonment has been freeing others from confinement, including Calliope, Nada, and eventually even Orpheus. As Dream remarks, he has learned from his recent experience. He is not throwing his existence away because it no longer matters. Nor, for that matter, is he simply purging his guilt. He is following a fuller understanding of duty to what he has learned is right.

Freeing Orpheus from imprisonment by finally giving him death is the direct cause of Dream's own death. Like the other Endless, Dream understands that one of the basic rules of their existence is that anyone who spills family blood becomes the prey of the Erinyes, also known as the Furies or the Kindly Ones. Nevertheless, he watches or even nudges into motion the series of events that brings him and Orpheus together again and that leads him to grant his son's plea for release. At a level below full consciousness, the Sandman knows what he is doing, and he knows what the consequences will be: his own extinction and replacement by another embodiment of Dream.

That the Sandman accepts this personal end must show that he has realised that his own past actions have been mistaken, that the way he has carried out his duties has sometimes been wrong. The immediate cause of that realisation must be what Dream has learned by his own experience what it means to be a prisoner. However, his imprisonment appears actually to be the culmination of a process of unverbalised reconsideration that had been going on for a very long time. As Mr. Punch shows, remember, adults try not to reveal what truly is going on inside themselves for fear of it being noticed by someone else—or by themselves. They must bring out their concerns in fiction, obviously artificial tales that onlookers can hold away at a safe distance. And so in the story “Men of Good Fortune” Dream approaches the eager young hack playwright Will Shaxbeard with the query whether he would like to be able to “write great plays? Create new dreams to spur the minds of men?” A later story reveals that they have come to terms: Dream has given the aspiring writer access to “the great stories”, the tales that embody basic human fears and desires, and in return William Shakespeare will write two plays for him and have the first performed as his patron desires. Thus, on June 23, 1593, a play about the confusions ensuing when mortals and non-mortals mingle, is performed as A Midsummer Night's Dream by a band of human players before an audience the Sandman has invited from the realm of Faerie.

Two aspects of Gaiman's script, winner of a World Fantasy Award for best short story, are especially worth noting. For one, the story contains references to a subject from the past that has not yet been shown to readers: Orpheus and his fate. Queen Titania's comment during the play that she “heard this tale sung once, in old Greece, by a boy with a lyre” may be a reference to Orpheus; the play certainly refers to this part of Dream's past, as he watches expressionlessly, when Theseus finds “The riot of the tipsy Bacchanals tearing the Thracian singer in their rage” listed among possible subjects for dramatic presentation. More than that, readers note that even centuries before he acts to free Nada or Orpheus, Dream expresses uncertainty about the rightness of his actions. Following her comment just quoted, Titania remarks to Dream, “You are a deep one. I would I could fathom your motives … ?” Somewhat later in the play, Dream responds to her invitation to share confidences by musing,

I wonder, Titania. I wonder if I have done right.

And I wonder why I wonder. Will is a willing vehicle for the great stories.

Through him they will live for an age of man; and his words will echo down through time.

It is what he wanted.

But he did not understand the price.

Mortals never do. They only see the prize, their heart's desire, their dream … [sic] But the price of getting what you want, is getting what once you wanted.

And had I told him? Had he understood? What then? It would have made no difference.

Have I done right, Titania? Have I done right?

He gets no answer; Titania has not been listening. The important things for readers to notice about Dream's soliloquy are, first of all, that it shows him questioning himself at all, then that it shows him questioning himself in mortal terms: He is asking what would be “right” in terms of Shakespeare's welfare, not his own duty. As the directions in Gaiman's script indicate, “He's asking her a question, trying to solve the problem of whether it's Right to have ruined Shakespeare' life, even though he doesn't know that's what he's done” (p. 25). Finally, thus, it is worth noting the different levels of the character's thinking, so that he can ponder the rightness of having done something that he “doesn't know” he has done.

Finally, though this never is stated directly, there is the strong possibility that that Dream's remarks are caused not just by pondering the rightness of his past actions—especially concerning Orpheus, his only son—but by what he may observe happening in Shakespeare's relationship with his son Hamnet. As a playwright newly aware of his powers, Shakespeare appears to care only about his art. Hamnet feels “distant” from his father, as if he is “less real to him than any of the characters in his plays,” and he even repeats his sister's joke “that if I died, he'd just write a play about it. ‘Hamnet.’” Hamnet's doubts are left as unresolved as the Sandman's, as he must stare at his father form a distance “WITH LONGING, WITH LOVE” (p. 26). As I commented in an earlier essay on Gaiman, watching one self-absorbed father ignore his resentful son might also stir painful uncertainty in another father who has lost his son by letting alienation turn into permanent separation (p. 352).

Even if Dream does not react overtly to all that is happening around and within himself, readers notice what is going on. Events in The Sandman demonstrate repeatedly that nothing stays the same forever, that outgrown roles can and must be abandoned. The inhabitants of Faerie cut off connection with the world of humans; Lucifer abandons Hell (Season of Mist); even Destruction, Dream's Endless brother, leaves his role to search for new interests (Brief Lives). Also, in the only story included in two reprint albums, Death shows Dream that the end of existence is not necessarily to be dreaded (“The Sound of Her Wings” in Preludes & Nocturnes and The Doll's House). Moreover, in a story in which Dream does not appear himself, Death even endorses the idea of suicide, telling a disfigured, embittered superheroine that “Your life is your own … So is your death” (“Facade” in Dream Country), virtually the same words Dream speaks, apparently without awareness of their irony, to the mutilated Orpheus. After witnessing all this, readers can reasonably surmise what is going on under Dream's unemotional exterior. We may accept the final educated guess by Lucien, Dream's librarian, that “he did a little more than let it [his death] happen … Sometimes, perhaps, one must change or die. And, in the end, there were, perhaps, limits to how much he could let himself change” (“In Which a Wake Is Held”, p. 19). So we may see that Gaiman is not simply indulging in polite euphemisms when he does not say that Dream “dies” at the end of The Kindly Ones but rather that he “passes on” (Foldout chronology of the magazine/publishing project in The Tempest).

The wonder, after all, is that a character like Dream could move at all. Even seeing all the evidence that readers do, Dream resists awareness and change even more determinedly than most mere humans could. Why should one of Endless change? How can one of them change? Dream does not know, at least not consciously. In his last meeting with Will Shakespeare, however, he explains why he chose the subject of the second play Will owed him, The Tempest. “I wanted a tale of graceful ends. I wanted a play about a King who drowns his books, and breaks his staff, and leaves his kingdom. About a magician who becomes a man. About a man who turns his back on magic.” At the time, he denies that he sees himself reflected in the characters who leave one condition so they can enter another: “I do not. I MAY not. I am Prince of stories, Will; but I have no story of my own. Nor shall I ever.” As readers know, having absorbed The Sandman and having watched Morpheus move out of his endless isolation, he is wrong. What makes it possible for the Sandman to escape self-protective role playing is the experience of fiction. Apparently, as we extend ourselves into other characters and see their confused motives and actions, we become aware—if not fully conscious, even then—of our own. Seeing how they use the possibilities in their lives, we can catch sight of what we might do.

Through fantasies, in other words, we can become aware of our ability to hurt others. We also can become aware that we may be able to choose not to do it.

This is true in Mr. Punch too, especially in two important scenes. The first comes midway through the book, between the first and second “true facts” listed above. Earlier in the same night the boy discovers that his grandfather is not sleeping at home, he has a dream of wandering through his grandfather's arcade alone in the dark, while he hears the sound of “Crocodiles and alligators and older, huger reptiles” moving around him. This happens after he has tried on Professor Swatchell's crocodile handpuppet and has felt the sense of primordial power that identity carries with it, how attractive it is to the wielder and how menacing to an outsider. In the dream, he runs toward a lighted Punch and Judy theatre, inside which “the doctor was cutting open Pretty Polly, Punch's forgotten girlfriend. Punch stood beside him, looking sad.” The idea of illicit sex has barely been hinted at thus far, and the consequences—the pregnancy that a doctor might be operating to terminate—are even farther ahead in the book. However, since people habitually deny understanding of what they have seen, it is quite possible that the boy could have noticed clues that he repressed, before the memories that he does show us. As the puppet doctor cuts the empty female puppet open, though, a life-size hand emerges, which the doctor begins to cut with his knife: “Punch laughed, and I wondered who the third hand belonged to,” the narrator says. The hand is blank white, not yet marked by use. It is raised in the direction of the doctor and Mr. Punch, as if to defend Pretty Polly, but it does not move once it has emerged. It is present but unable to “grasp” its surroundings. Instead, it is at the mercy of the active adults. In all this the hand resembles the boy: “I turned to run: but there was nothing anywhere but the darkness. No shelter, no safety. I had lost my way, and I was alone in the night. And already the crocodiles were beginning to roar.” Accompanying these words is a pair of panels, one showing the boy as a tiny, indistinct stick-figure, the other filled with the largest picture of him in the book, a photographic montage that merges the boy's features and a crocodile's. It may be that the boy feels threatened and is resisting being swallowed; it may be that the boy is metamorphosing into the powerful reptile. The choice is not clearly made, for it cannot be clearly stated. The boy cannot let himself know what he knows, let alone act on the knowledge.

A somewhat clearer choice appears at the very end of Mr. Punch, when the adult narrator attends a celebration of Mr. Punch's birthday, one May in a Covent Garden churchyard. The selfish, murderous Mr. Punch evidently is quite socially acceptable, and the narrator toys with the idea of “abandoning the life I had built for myself” and running a Punch and Judy show, “teaching the children, and those with an eye and a mind to see with, the lessons of death that went back to the dawn times; amusing and delighting both old and young.” He even thinks he catches a glimpse of Professor Swatchell in the crowd, though he later realizes that the old man must be dead by now: “Everybody dies but Mr. Punch, and he has only the life he steals from others.” When, therefore, he is offered a chance to put Mr. Punch on his hand, he is tempted because “It would have whispered its secrets to me, explained my childhood, explained my life … [sic]” However, the narrator appears to realise that those secrets, like the puppet's vitality, would have been stolen from him and distorted before being returned to his conscious self again. Triumphant at the end of the play, Mr. Punch exclaims “Hooray! Hooray! The Devil is dead! Now everybody is free to do whatever they wish!,” but the narrator turns away: “I left the churchyard then, shivering in spite of the May sunshine, and went about my life.”

As in Violent Cases, the narrator of Mr. Punch wants to understand where he is, realising that most of his certainties are undependable. The very categories he uses to make sense of his world may be too distorted and rigid to do more than keep him in the same rut he began settling into while he was deciding how to become an adult. If that is the case, he may be in danger of passing on false information to the people around him so they won't know where they are either. Thus parents unthinkingly lie to their children while tacitly daring them to disagree; and thus children learn to disguise their resentment at being lied to so they unconsciously can pass on misinformation to even younger people. As in The Sandman, however, Mr. Punch suggests that releasing one's inhibitions and exploring apparently remote, fantastic scenarios may be the best way to discover what choices of direction we actually have. We might even begin to share our search for human truth. In any event, since we do live in a world of dreams anyway, the most dangerous thing we could do would be to deny that true fact and refuse to acknowledge our dreams.

Works Cited

David, Peter. “But I Digress” [column]. Comics Buyer's Guide #1130 (September 15, 1995), p. 82.

Gaiman, Neil. Mr. Punch. A Romance. Script.

———. The Sandman: Brief Lives [Sandman #41-49]. New York: DC Comics, 1994.

———. The Sandman: The Doll's House [Sandman #8-16]. New York: DC Comics, 1990.

———. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections [Sandman #29-31, 38-40, 50, Sandman Special #1, and Vertigo Preview]. New York: DC Comics, 1993.

———. The Sandman: Dream Country [Sandman #17-20]. New York: DC Comics, 1991.

———. The Sandman: A Game of You [Sandman #32-37]. New York: DC Comics, 1993.

———. “In Which a Wake Is Held” [Chapter Two of “The Wake”]. The Sandman #71 (September 1995)

———. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones [Sandman #57-69 and Vertigo Jam #1]. New York: DC Comics, 1996.

———. “A Midsummer Night's Dream” [script].

———. The Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes [Sandman #1-8]. New York: DC Comics, 1991.

———. The Sandman: Season of Mists [Sandman #21-28]. New York: DC Comics, 1992.

———. “The Tempest.” The Sandman #75 (March 1996).

———. The Sandman: World's End [Sandman #51-56]. New York: DC Comics, 1994.

———. The Tragical Comedy or Comical Tragedy of Mr. Punch. New York: Vertigo/DC Comics, 1995.

———. Violent Cases. Northampton MA: Tundra, 1992.

Groth, Gary. “Neil Gaiman” [interview]. The Comics Journal #169 (July 1994), pp. 54-108.

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton MA: Kitchen Sink, 1993.

Sanders, Joe. “Gaiman, Neil (Richard).” St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers. Ed. Jay P. Pederson. Detroit: St. James Press, 1996, pp. 350-352.

Thompson, Kim. “Neil Gaiman” [interview]. The Comics Journal #155 (January 1993), pp. 64-83.